Migration Quotes

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.

~ Mohsin Hamid

In a sea of human beings, it is difficult, at times even impossible, to see the human as being.

~ Aysha Taryam

Some people are so much heaven to the square inch that life is simply hell, when she leaves you in order to go south for the winter. (Yes, women are people too, sometimes even threee.)

~ Will Advise

I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.

~ Aanchal Malhotra

This Heart at Peace is My Homeland. (Su Shih)

~ Sung Yee Poon

A bracing wind swirls about the boy and alights gently upon his shoulder to gape frightfully at droplets of fate joined infirmly to a sweep of atmospheric and lunar forces far beyond their capabilities to resist. He takes a long, deep breath of air—cleansed through its migration—and he closes his eyes.Scattered waves roll back in to the sea.

~ Ashim Shanker

Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...

~ Nabeel Philip Mohan

You are...the embodimentof immediate good karma.The equalizer between bottomfeeders and the sanctimoniouscogs in the system.

~ G.a.p. Gutierrez

Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It's another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.

~ Wilfred Waters

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

~ Mujel Hasan

Haris...as a naive migrantwho just moved here,relying on you tapered worries.

~ Tammy Sulit

Even the new things thatI less than know,I keep trying, did againuntil perfect.

~ Alliah Lenzkie Tabaya

Rucksacks. What do people whose life stops here take with them? Makina could see their rucksacks crammed with time. Amulets, letters, sometimes a huapango violin, sometimes a jaranera harp. Jackets. People who left took jackets because they’d been told that if there was one thing they could be sure of over there, it was the freezing cold, even if it was desert all the way. They hid what little money they had in their underwear and stuck a knife in their back pocket. Photos, photos, photos. They carried photos like promises but by the time they came back they were in tatters.

~ Yuri Herrera

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

~ Dan Smith

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.

~ Harsha Walia

You must regard this deviation from your plan as part of the adventure that you sought when you decided to embark on it in the first place...Absence of certainty is its essence. People...who choose to shun the mundane must not only expect, but also enjoy and profit from surprises.

~ Adam Yamey

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

~ V.s. Naipaul

And there, next to me, as the east wind blows in early fall, a season open to great migrations, are those lives, threading the air and waters of the sea, that come out of an incomparable darkness, which is also my own.

~ John Hay

Our fights must be rooted in experiences, in stories, and in anecdotes. People remember these more than sterile numbers or facts. Myths are powerful magic and can turn enemies into friends. In a world where too many still tell stories that some are illegal and that to be free we must control the movement of others, the work of making new myths is essential.

~ Syed Khalid Hussan

If our goal is to slow migration, then the best way to do so is to work for a more equitable global system. But slowing migration is an odd goal, if the real problem is global inequality.

~ Aviva Chomsky

I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.

~ Earl Lovelace

When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

~ Jeanette Winterson

The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.

~ Mohsin Hamid

Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided

~ Aanchal Malhotra

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

~ Edward Said

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another.

~ Ellsworth Huntington

Stuff and nonsense: you must regard this deviationfrom your plan as part of the adventure that you soughtwhen you decided embark on it in the first place. Trueadventure does not follow well-trodden paths. Absenceof certainty is its essence. People, like you and I, whochoose to shun the mundane must not only expect, butalso enjoy and profit from surprises.

~ Adam Yamey

When this flood blocks the road I am worried more by my soil getting washed, than by getting late to reach my destination.

~ Suman Pokhrel

The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!

~ Kenneth Grahame

Migration is often accompanied by a feeling of unavoidable disorientation, and the circumstances of 1947 would have pronounced this feeling. In most cases, it would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the Partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out their identity sparsely over the expanse of this distance. As a result, somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence – strangely malleable.

~ Aanchal Malhotra

Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.” I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year…It’s an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year’s productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that-despite the problems- still has what it takes to really produce.

~ Carl Safina

The UN has protocols on both 'smuggling people' and on 'trafficking in persons.' At meetings to discuss these laws, it became clear that 'trafficking' was the term used to discuss women and children, while 'smuggling' was used to refer to men.

~ Melissa Ditmore

Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are all different.How different, though? Different better, or different worse? Such basic questions underlie whether people are willing to accept outsiders in their midst

~ Philippe Legrain